fiendsreachfandomcom-20200213-history
Ruaz
"Power, is it's own reward." HISTORY Ruaz's parents were simple gnolls, two among many who would go on to create the Sleazefang pack of his birth. The Sleazefang gnolls originally existed as loners and outcasts from other packs in the river kingdoms that had been tricked by a wizard into serving as his lab rats for an experiment involving infusing fast breeding gnolls with sorcerer and bloodrager bloodlines derived from the blood of other, far more powerful creatures, with the end goal of creating something new and far more dangerous to serve as his 'army of darkness' in yet another instance of people with far too little common sense trying to achieve far more power then they can control. When the tortured and mutated gnolls eventually escaped, they killed their 'master' and fled into the woods, where they unified, and became a minor nuisance for surrounding villages in their immediate areas as they roamed the wilder untamed lands to be found there. Born with a mutant third eye in the center of his skull, the sibling-less infant Ruaz was considered a high note in the history of an otherwise failing and self-destructing from rampant and wide spread health complications pack due to a total failure by most among them to successfully carry children to full term. Meeting their end four years after his birth, the pack was wiped out by a mercenary/adventuring team of brothers operating under the name of 'The Barbarrow brothers', who had been hired to wipe out the gnoll by a local human village in response to recent increased proximity and hostilities by the gnolls. Able to escape the massacre due to his smaller size, Ruaz was the only survivor of the massacre he ever knew of, and the Sleazefang pack would go on to be the only pack he ever felt truly apart of, as his third eye mutation would be seen by others of his kind as a blasphemous insult against the goddess of the gnolls, Lamashtu, as it's origins did not lie within her machinations, but instead merely the works of a mad human wizard. Although he would spend two years hopping from gnoll pack to gnoll pack while he continued to mature, Ruaz quickly grew disenfranchised with his own kind. Regularly struggling to identify with his own kind's motiveless bloodlust, love for violence, and lacking the innately gnollish level of laziness in approach to life common to his kind, the young gnoll, by this point already beginning to display further physical deviations from normal members of his kind as his claws and fangs began to grow unnaturally long and sharp, split from gnollish society and took up with traveling bandits and mercenaries. Although originally joining up with the brigands and sells words of other races out of a desire to hunt down and avenge the deaths of his pack at the hands of the Barbarrow brothers, Ruaz would eventually abandon such efforts after several years of total absence of any sign or word of them, by which time he was already fully immersed into the traitorous, cut-throat world of the mercenary lifestyle. Now a full adult, and finding coin a far more agreeable reason for risking his life in combat then any he'd ever been able to find living among his own kind, the mutated gnoll remained an active and frequent participant in bandit culling's and battlefields across the river kingdoms, marching alongside other like minded individuals in constant pursuit of someone else' problems, that they might be willing to pay to have fixed by Ruaz and his ilk. For fourteen years, this would remain the nature of Ruaz's life. Exploiting peasants and fat miserable barons or the occasional down on their luck royal for their gold in exchange for solving their problems for them, whatever those problems might be, or for fighting on their behalf in wars of their own making. All the while, suffering from further and more extreme physical mutations as a result of the circumstances of his genetic inheritance from his experimented upon parents, something he only possessed the most basic of knowledge of. Things would stay this way, unerringly by his own choice, until the day came when Ruaz decided to participate in a mercenary contract by a particularly unsavory local ruler for men to go into a neighboring country's closest village, and scare the villagers within into pledging their allegiance to him instead of their current lord. Upon arriving however, Ruaz and his accomplices discovered the village to be occupied by a near-equal in size bandit group among which several magic wielders were present. During the fighting, Ruaz was targeted by an enemy caster with a teleportation spell that sent him reeling dozens of feat up in the sky above a nearby lake. When he at last came to, he found himself washed up on the shore of Fiend's Reach, greeted by a dragon and a sailor, and informed that he could never return to Golarion again. Something that only annoyed the gnoll insofar as his inability to get paid for his efforts in his prior job that had gotten him trapped here in the first place. Quickly acquiring for himself a comfortable position of military authority in the city of Kurx as the General of Chompy's armies, the gnoll would begin amassing for himself a following of like minded mercenaries out of cities of the likes of Kurx, Yharnam, and eventually Scholor's Redemption's criminal underbelly. Loyal to him and primarily his gold, such profiteers were hired under an agreement with him that in exchange for a kickback percentage on their profits, he would locate job opportunities for them, which he immediately did by arranging nightly culling raids on the beast infestation of Yharnam, using his own political authority to legally line his pockets in Kurx, and striking a deal with Gumption and the council members of Scholor's Redemption, at the end of which Ruaz became the only legally recognized source of private security within the city. It was during this time that Ruaz first met his primary enforcer and constant headache, Wimp Lo, who the opportunistic gnoll has used as a means of keeping his growing mass of underlings in line ever since. Unfortunately, The health problems he had inherited from his parents' unfortunate past did not fade with his arrival in The Reach. Either by simple inevitability or as a result of his condition being aggravated somehow by his supernatural transportation to The Reach, Ruaz's health began to decline sharply. His physical mutations growing more and more extreme as his physical condition continued to deteriorate, eventually resulting in his dependency on artificial magitech replacements to facilitate his survival once his own rising core temperature began causing organ damage. Hiring on a Xenoalchemist named Monty from Yharnam, the gnoll grew increasingly more reclusive as his health continued to fail and his body grew more and more unnatural. All of which finally culminated in a massive reincarnation into a gargantuan dragon of rock and magma as the experiment conducted upon his pack and parents finally manifested itself in a form the long dead wizard could only have dreamed of in his wildest expectations. Now reborn, Ruaz finds himself at odds with a lifetime's memories of cowardly cringing and keeping his head down for his own safety as a gnoll conflicting with a newly emerged draconic sense of self entitlement and superiority over most other forms of life. Where before as a gnoll he might have happily spent his days serving in Kurx under the command and leadership of Chompy, now the dragon already begins to plan his leave from the city in pursuit of a kingdom of his own where he alone will rule with an iron fist in the name of further glorious wealth and power. APPEARANCE Dragon: A volcano in draconic form, Ruaz now bears the form of a Gargantuan magma dragon. In place of flesh and blood he possesses dark black pyroclastic rock and flowing magma. A third eye sits in the center of his forehead, and horrific flesh burning heat super-saturates the air around him as he constantly gives off billowing clouds of volcanic smoke and oozes flowing magma. Due to the highly destructive nature of his true form, he struggles to find places to occupy where he can remain in it without causing unwanted destruction, and most typically is found in his humanoid form whenever he is within city limits or beyond the bounds of his own property line in kurx. Humanoid: A typical gnoll in height and build with a third eye in his forehead, black stony horns growing out of the back of his skull, and a long draconic tail made of the same black stone trailing behind him. His eyes, teeth, and the entirety of his inner mouth is made out of the same black material, giving him the appearance of an animated black stone statue someone stretched a gnoll pelt over. Animal: A black faced vulture with greatly enlarged wings and three glowing eyes of fire that constantly gives off clouds of smoke and ash as if it had recently flown through an ash cloud or been in a fire very recently. The bird is almost always seen wearing a Circlet of Speaking when Ruaz is in this form so he can communicate while using it. Personality Cold, calculating, and utterly self-serving. Ruaz has been on his own from an extremely young age, and took from those lonely years among his own kind and most self serving of people the lands had to offer several life lessons that have dictated the course of his life as an untrusting, greedy, opportunistic scavenger of other people's misfortunes. He has genuinely enjoyed demanding people's money to solve their problems for them from the moment he first got into the mercenary business, and considers more human valued emotions such as mercy, generosity, self-sacrifice, and forgiveness to be signs of weakness in others. Although he has never been proactive or invested enough to actively create or facilitate misfortune for other people to benefit himself, his views on good and evil are equally dismissive. While he values those who work for him and actively strives to watch over them, it is more out of a warped sense of ownership of them as tools towards his own goals, then a true empathetic endearment towards most of them. Friends Never particularly close to anyone after a lifetime spent serving as a opportunistic sellsword among Golarion degenerates and disgraced knights unable to make a living any other way, what friends Ruaz has managed to keep in his life were all long dead by the time the disgruntled gnoll washed up on The Reach's shores. Despite a genuine indifference towards the problems and values of others he can't directly profit off of, Ruaz has managed to meet several people in this new world overflowing with gold he finds himself in that he enjoys associating with. Gazeck / "Chompy": First meeting each other in Douglas' Tavern, a one time common haunt for Ruaz, Chompy offered the then gnoll on as his general after recognizing the use of someone as brutally efficient as the career mercenary was in such matters. Despite Ruaz's general distrust for anyone currently hiring him for any kind of extended job, Chompy managed to foster an agreeable comradery in the curmudgeon through constant honest dealings and conduct. It is only recently as a dragon that Ruaz has actually admitted to considering Chompy to be someone he truly considers to be his friend and ally. Wimp Lo: An imbecile of noteworthy fighting prowess Ruaz first met in a bar and nearly got his ass kicked by after deciding to toy with the man for his own amusement and severally underestimating him as a result. Ruaz views Wimp Lo as both a constant headache and an amusingly useful fool too stupid to ever willfully betray him in any meaningful way, as Ruaz actively refuses to discuss dangerously sensitive plans infront of the butter-loving pimp master. Edric Grimholt: They first met each other in Douglas' Tavern, where Edric very nearly pulled a sword on Ruaz the moment he saw the then gnoll. Ruaz views the man as being far too moral to ever involve in any of his schemes, while also being too much of a morally upstanding do-gooder to ever (literally) stab him in the back for his share of the gold when a job is done. As such, Ruaz typically enjoys working alongside the man, despite his lack of true friendship towards him, and frequently engages in self-amusing banter matches with Edric due to their conflicting viewpoints on the morality of any given situation they find themselves in. Enemies From his days in Gollarion, the only ones to survive earning themselves the position of true enemies of the gnoll are the three human brothers who operated briefly out of the river kingdoms as adventurers for hire going by the name of 'The Barbarrow Brothers'. These three men were responsible for the deaths of Ruaz's original pack and parents, and were never able to be hunted down by the gnoll, who eventually settled for taking his bloody revenge out on the villagers who had hired them years after the original event by paying a band of bandits to put the village to the torch with the same amount of gold they themselves had paid to have his pack murdered. In The Reach, Ruaz has found very few individuals who honestly bother him enough to be considered enemies. He recognizes the threat the Scarecrow represents to his life, but the mad god has not been an active enough threat in his time spent in The Reach so far that Ruaz struggles to consider him to be anything more then similar to some far off natural disaster. A thing best left avoided and thus easily forgotten about, for now. Gumption Taitanna: Queen of Scholar's Redemption and a somewhat amiable acquaintance of the then gnoll's when he first arrived in The Reach, things soured between the two when Ruaz's efforts to turn a profit on what he believed at the time to be an unawakaned abandoned construct lead to implications of him being a slaver by Gumption, who assaulted him magically at the meeting's end. False apologies by the gnoll over the matter, his own exploitative nature, a deal broken by Gumption after the fact of it's agreement, and multiple attempts by her to threaten his life or harass him into disobeying orders from Chompy to not fight her or any of the goblin's other friends under pain of death, have seen to it Ruaz permanently views her as an untrustworthy, and dangerously impulsive individual best left avoided. Aspirations Above all other things in his life, Ruaz is consumed by a desire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, with little to no actual desire to put it towards anything more then his personal coffers due to a general disdain for lavish upper class lifestyles so enjoyed by more 'civilized' humanoid races. He learnned from an early age the power gold can bring, and has all but literally hungered for and been driven to many a depraved act by it all his adult life. It is only now that he has transformed into a dragon that his hunger for wealth has broadened into a more encompassing desire to rule over others, and while his borderline predatory views on how best to go about making money have dulled somewhat with his sudden change, he remains no less indifferent to the clink of coin at another's expense. Category:Character